THE. AR T GALLE.RIE.S Two Loan Shows-WPA Sculpture-MacIver T AST week was in L some ways an odd one in the gal- leries. Two loan shows, which I had hoped would furnish some excitement be- tween them, were more or less disap- pointing, while there were a number of less-heralded exhibi- tions which turned out to be interest- ing and pleasan t affairs. The loan shows are the Cézanne exhibition at Durand-Ruel, given for the benefit of Hope Farm, and the showing of por- traits by Rae burn at J acgues Seligmann, which was sponsored by the Adopt A Family Committee of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Now, it may be paradoxical to say that a show by anyone as fixed and in- variable in style as Raeburn can possibly he a disappoin tmen 1. Given the name, knowing the man's manner, you can tell in ad vance what you are going to see-in this case a roomful of ringleted eighteenth-century ladies, alternating with periwigged, red-coated generals, all correctly drawn, carefully posed, and appropriately highlighted, but as cold now as so many leftover boiled potatoes. There is expertness here, of course, for Raeburn, though less grace- ful than Romney and less imaginative than Gainsborough, was (by reason of his stubborn Scottish blood, perhaps) more thoroughly "competent" than either. But only two of the eighteen portraits on view exude any feeling of permanent warmth-those of Master James Cochrane and Mrs. Mary Smith -and the show proves again, with de- pressing thoroughness, how complete- ly mechanical in all its functions eigh- teenth-century English portrait painting was. So much for Raehurn. To say, how- ever, that a Cézanne show is disappoint- ing is a different matter: you have to smile when you say it, and give your reasons. Yet the present one, to my mind, is definitely so-unless, by an- other paradox, the very unevenness of the paintings selected be taken to have a sort of compensatory value in the light they occasionally throw on the de- velopment of the painter's art. Nearly half of the twenty-one pictures shown date from the eighteen-seventies, when Cézanne was still in his thirties and struggling to formulate an artistic meth- od of his own out of the various influ- ences-of Courbet, Manet, and the modified Impressionism of Pissarro- that he was then under. In this sense, at least, his "Chaumière dans Ies Arbres, à Auvers," dated 1873, is a highly in- teresting study, if only as a point of de- parture, so to speak, toward the infinite- ]y more refined vision and formal clar- ity he was able to apply to similar scenes in later years. Similarly, one or two of the stilllifes hint at the tonal richness and precise color he was afterward to attain, and so does the small landscape called "Le Verger," with its superbly accurate greens. The harsh modelling and thick application of pigment in the "Portrait du Père de l' Artiste," of around 1875, represents perhaps a throwback to the heavily outlined "strong" painting he was doing ten years before. If the exhihition had been planned historicaIJy, as a survey of the artist's career, it would seem that relatively /. more attention should have been paid to its later periods, and at least a few examples should have been included of the really great paintings that marked its triumphant summation. Instead, the proportions of the show are such that the eighties and nineties seem more or less skipped over, and the selections from the work of those years harely indi- cate the main directions of his thought at the time. But though the net result is SOlne- how to remove from the collection all sense of the splendor of accomplish- ment that was Cézanne's, this does not mean that the show is to be overlooked entirely. There's a small canvas called "La Lutte d'Amour," of a tumble of figures on a grassy field, that-while it gives little hint of the great series of "Bathers," almost architectural in their design, that he was to do later-is charming enough for its own sake in its air of roly-poly sensuality. There are a couple of lovely early landscapes (notably "La Côte des Beeufs," in which his familiar pines and pine shad- ows already figure), and another later one, "La :Montagne Sainte- Victoire au Grand Pin," which suggest the match- less visual understanding, enabling him to create form and mass through the sheer vibration of color on the air and the retina, that was the man's final achievement. 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